The Right’s New Grand Unified Theory: Blame Women for Everything

Helen Andrews’s latest screed is short on rational facts, long on mushy feelings of misogyny.

Oct 22, 2025

THE LATEST INTELLECTUAL BUZZ on the right is about a Compact magazine essay that boils down to ‘Women ruin everything.’ The piece by Helen Andrews, titled “The Great Feminization”—a follow-up to a tweet thread and a speech at the National Conservatism conference last month—is, you could say, the modern-day equivalent of sixteenth-century Scottish preacher John Knox’s celebrated polemic, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women. But where Knox inveighed against what he saw as unnatural rule by female monarchs, Andrews has a much broader target: the rise in female political and social power in Western societies. There is no precedent, Andrews writes, for how Europe and North America have “experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses.” This experiment, she says, has become a “potential threat to civilization.”

It’s not that women are bad, says Andrews; but their distinct qualities and values—“empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition”—transform these institutions in ruinous ways. Let too many women flock to academia, and we get touchy-feely stuff instead of “open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth.” Too many women in journalism spell the decline of “prickly individualists” willing to brave public disapproval. (Other, that is, than Andrews herself, who is careful to inform the reader that she’s not like other girls: she has “a lot of disagreeable opinions” and is not down with a “conflict-averse and consensus-driven” culture.) Business? Goodbye, “swashbuckling spirit”; hello, “feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy.” Worse, Andrews frets, “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.” And culture-wide, the triumph of girl power means the never-ending tyranny of “woke.”

LET’S NOT MINCE WORDS: This a grotesquely misogynistic screed. The inevitable rejoinder, of course, is that such a charge is not a rebuttal: Facts don’t care about your feelings, and if you’re a woman who says that Andrews’s narrative is noxious instead of asking whether it’s true, you’re actually proving her point. But are there actual truths in this thesis? Well, there is certainly evidence that sex differences in human psychology and behavior, whether due to socialization, biology, or both, are real and affect social interactions. Andrews’s account of those differences, however, is a crude caricature, data-free except for a mention of “one survey [which] found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.”

Attorney and blogger Ivana Greco traced this factoid (only with “inclusive,” not “cohesive”) to a 2019 Knight Foundation survey of college students on issues related to free expression. But as it turns out, this huge gender gap was not replicated in the foundation’s subsequent annual surveys. By 2022, the overall percentage of students who said that an inclusive society was “extremely important” had plummeted from 69 percent to 41 percent, evidently with no significant gender difference; similar shares of men and women, about six out of ten, said it was more important to “allow students to be exposed to all types of speech even if they may find it offensive or biased” than to protect them from offensive speech. The 2024 survey did find that female students were more likely than their male peers to say that hate speech should not be protected by the First Amendment (57 percent vs. 46 percent); but that 11-point gender gap was down from 28 points in the 2019 survey. Did the change represent an actual shift in opinions or was the 2019 gender gulf a fluke? Hard to say.

Andrews also invokes a study mentioned by psychologist Joyce Benenson in her 2014 book Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes: A group of men assigned to a problem-solving task in a laboratory experiment will “jockey for talking time, disagree loudly,” and then report a solution—while women will engage in polite chit-chat about personal stuff, smile a lot, and pay “little attention to the task.” This sounded so implausible that I got the book and tracked down the references. It turns out that the studies, which Andrews sets in “a modern psychology lab,” date back to . . . the early 1950s. (What’s more, of the three footnoted sources I checked out, two made no mention of the participants’ sex, and one passingly mentioned mixed male/female groups.)

This doesn’t mean that the patterns Andrews alleges have no basis in reality whatsoever. But it’s instructive to compare her piece with a just-published article by another source she cites: psychologist Cory Clark, currently a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania (and a member of the “heterodox” academic subculture). Clark’s article raises somewhat similar points about the possible negative effects of women’s greater tendency toward harm aversion and preference for equity over other values. However, it does so in a nuanced and thoughtful way, while also pointing out the positives and arguing that good institutions should incorporate both male and female strengths. One may question some of the generalizations, but Clark, at least, acknowledges that the differences she discusses are often minor and that the question of nature vs. nurture is far from settled.

Women on average do tend to be less competitive and more risk-averse than men, very possibly at least in part due to biology. (On the other hand, some studies have found the gap reversed in matrilineal ethnic subcultures in India and China, where women have high levels of autonomy and power.) Women also tend to score higher on empathy, at least on self-reports; but such differences are also mediated by large overlap. Thus, in one large 2018 study of “empathizing” vs. “systemizing” (analytical) personality types, 43 percent of women and 25 percent of men were classified as “empathizers,” 44 percent of men and 27 percent of women as “systemizers,” and the rest as “balanced.”

How this plays out in practice is extremely situation- and culture-specific. It’s worth noting that a management style associated with “feminine” cooperation and consensus-seeking has long been the norm in extremely male-dominated Japanese corporations. The idea that “wokeness” is simply the inevitable fate of female-run organizations ignores the plain fact that there were plenty of female-run organizations before the 2010s—including women’s colleges, which, historically, were extremely far removed from the norms and values of modern academic progressivism.

Today, there is research showing that female faculty (younger faculty, at least) and Ph.D. students in North America and the United Kingdom are more left-wing than their male peers; they are also more likely on average to prioritize social justice over truth-seeking, to support the suppression of views deemed harmful to oppressed groups, and to believe that it’s more important for the curriculum to have racial and gender diversity than to include “foundational texts.” But the findings vary considerably: For instance, some differences appear among North American (especially Canadian) but not British academics. What’s more, gender is far from the only fault line on free speech, hate speech, inclusivity/diversity, etc.: The racial and religious gaps tend to be larger. Black college students are far more likely than whites to support restrictions on offensive or hateful speech; likewise Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu students compared to Catholics or Protestants. The probable explanation is not that some demographics are inherently more libertarian; it’s that people from traditionally privileged groups tend to think of speech-policing as something that protects everyone else and punishes them, while people from groups that have traditionally faced discrimination and bigotry tend to be more sensitive about demeaning speech. Go figure.

The fault lines are also political, with Republicans and conservatives consistently professing more support for free speech than Democrats and progressives—which, of course, ties into Andrews’s argument that modern progressivism and the Democratic Party represent the rise of feminized America. But therein lies the rub: do we, after the last ten months, really take the right’s supposed commitment to free expression and opposition to “cancelations” for offensive speech at face value? Can anyone still seriously argue that today’s MAGAfied Republican party is America’s pro-free speech faction?

The same objection—Have you seen the other side?—goes double for some of Andrews’s other feminine horribles. Are we supposed to find that swashbuckling masculine spirit of business in the sight of our manly tech tycoons groveling before Donald Trump? And let’s not get started on the rule of law under Trump, that supposed restorer of American manhood. Andrews points to the Title IX campus tribunals adjudicating sexual misconduct claims—often with egregious violations of due process and overbroad definitions of offenses—as the prime example of what to expect when the courts end up in female hands and the guilt of the accused is presumed based on empathy for the alleged victims. It’s an issue on which I have repeatedly written myself (and on which a good many feminists have spoken out); but unfair suspension or even expulsion from college seems rather trivial compared to, say, due process–free deportation to a gulag in El Salvador. Or to the president’s use of the Justice Department as his personal law firm and of federal prosecutors as his henchmen who can be fired if they decline to pursue the president’s vendettas against his personal enemies.

Speaking of which, here’s a truly eye-popping post from Andrews’s X thread:

Men have the concept of an honorable enemy. Men can engage in conflict with an opponent and still respect them. When the conflict is over, they’ll shake the other guy’s hand and accept the outcome gracefully.
Women don’t have that. If you’re her enemy, you are subhuman garbage. No rules govern the fight; no shaking hands when it’s over. It is never over. . . .
Whatever the reason, this is actually the number one thing I worry about with the Great Feminization. I see it already in the female-dominated Democratic Party.

Only in the Democratic party? Really? Does Andrews recall which candidates in the last three elections “accept[ed] the outcome gracefully” and which did not? I won’t get into the supposed evidence for her sweeping assertions about how women handle conflict (except to say that some of it apparently comes from a sample of eighty athletes among whom men tended to spend slightly more time than women in post-match friendly contact such as hugs, hand clasps, or back pats). But you don’t need to be a super-astute judge of character to see that Donald Trump perfectly fits her description of the vindictive female: He is, as culture writer Kat Rosenfield puts it, “the red scrunchie-wearing queen bee from Heathers in the body of a 79-year-old man.” Rosenfield tries to square Andrews’s “feminization” thesis with Trump’s existence by arguing that his rise reflects a political culture “increasingly fueled by this very feminine brand of social aggression.”1 But that feels like a stretch—especially considering Trump’s lopsidedly male base and supporters’ sometimes creepy insistence on treating him as a paragon of manliness.

Andrews herself, meanwhile, simply ignores anything that doesn’t fit her theory and soldiers on, blaming women for every “woke” ill. Doctors publicly express support for gay rights, Gaza, or Black Lives Matter? It’s because “medicine has become more feminized.” (Women currently make up some 38 percent of physicians.) Bari Weiss got trashed on Slack by her colleagues at the New York Times, including some who had been nice to her in person? It’s the backstabbing women that done it. Corporations, overwhelmingly led by male CEOs, are supposedly turning workplaces into emasculated safe spaces? Blame the Karens in human resources. And so on and so forth.

WHATEVER THE ACTUAL DIFFERENCES between the sexes, trying to “gender” political movements and ideologies is nearly always a fool’s errand. (To take one example: The French Revolution, in which all or virtually all the major players were men, blended an ethos of consciously masculine republicanism, pitted against the perceived effeminacy of the old aristocratic world, with a “feminine” Rousseauist sensibility that celebrated empathy, expressive sentiment, and emotional authenticity.) Yet the widening political gap between young women and young men today, in the United States and a number of other countries, is very real. Many young men are pushed rightward, whether by the real or perceived excesses of progressivism, by male-oriented media, or by their peer-group environment; many women are pushed leftward, both by the reactionary gender politics of the right and by a progressive-leaning female culture. This divergence promotes not only unhealthy gender dynamics, but political subcultures that thrive on toxic gender stereotypes. Female-dominated left-wing spaces can get mired in moral purity tests based on the idea that a woman who strays from progressive dogma is a traitor to her gender while a man guilty of wrongthink is a carrier of “toxic masculinity.” Male-dominated right-wing spaces can push “anti-wokeness” to the point where racist and antisemitic talk becomes a badge of honor and the nastiest misogyny is blatant and rampant.

Andrews has waded into this morass with an ultra-simplistic message for those on the right: Everything they hate in modern American culture can be blamed on women, or at least on women’s social and political empowerment and their large-scale entry into public life. That message seems to be quite popular: Andrews’s talk was reportedly the big hit of NatCon, and the video got 170,000 views in the last seven weeks.

What does Andrews propose doing about the “Great Feminization,” which she warns must be stopped and reversed before it’s too late? It’s not clear. She unconvincingly suggests that it would be enough to “take our thumb off the scale” and roll back anti-discrimination laws that supposedly make it “illegal to employ too few women,” leading to favoritism by lawsuit-skittish employers and creating an environment in which “it is illegal for women to lose.” In fact, there is little evidence of widespread preferential treatment for women—the strong examples come from specific areas such as faculty posts in science and technology fields—and curbing it won’t stem “feminization.” But many of Andrews’s fans will undoubtedly clamor for far more drastic remedies, from purges intended to “defeminize” institutions to the repeal of female suffrage.

It is extremely unlikely that any strategies to reduce women’s influence would get off the ground, even under the Trump administration. But regardless of the results, there is little doubt that “Great Feminization” discourse will help (further) normalize misogyny on the right and drive women farther left. Andrews’s essay, whose principal thesis she admits is not original, contributes no new insights to our understanding of men and women. But it may well contribute to making our already fraught conversations about gender more extreme, more polarized, and more hostile.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?